


Shattered

by Seishuku Skuld (skuldchan)



Category: X -エックス- | X/1999
Genre: Angst, Body Horror, Character Death, Dark, Juvenalia, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-10-17
Updated: 2002-10-17
Packaged: 2021-01-03 17:14:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21183047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skuldchan/pseuds/Seishuku%20Skuld
Summary: I was running a 101 degree fever when I wrote this. It was a Sunday, right before my big Neuroscience final.





	Shattered

The man asked no questions. He was a doctor familiar with the Sumeragi household, healing our hurts when we had any, never asking any questions. He knew our line of work was dangerous, so he kept his mouth shut. He didn’t even ask any questions when I showed him the eye in its jar.

"I want a transplant,” I said simply. 

“What day is convenient for you?” the doctor asked nicely. He had short, dark black hair, strangely reflective in the antiseptic white lights of the hospital. He had a certain type of smile, the kind that not only creased the eyes, but spread across his entire face as he exuded a sense of peace and calm. It made my heart break.

“I’m free all Thursday.”

“How about eleven o’clock, Sumeragi-san?”

“It’s good.”

“Excellent. I’ll see you then.”

And that was it. I came in on Thursday, exactly at eleven o’clock in the morning. He didn’t ask any questions. I unsealed the jar, and he put me to sleep. When I woke up, I could see in three-dimensions again. It was oddly disorienting, as if I had gone to sleep in my own bed, and had woken up in a strange world, where color was too bright, and objects seemed to reach out to me. 

“How do you feel, Sumeragi-san?” the doctor asked, hovering over me protectively, as if I was some sort of rare lab specimen.

“Fine,” I lied. It was not fine. The world had changed during my slumber. My head hurt like a thousand swords had been stabbed into it, and all I wanted was to close my eyes, and drift into sleep again with the pain as my partner.

“Unusual,” the doctor murmured. He bade me sit up, took my chin in his hands in strangely intimate gesture. I shied away, but he gripped me firmly. I tried not to wince. “Amazing,” the doctor said again, peering into my new eye as if it was a book from which he could read the very darkest secrets of my soul. “There’s no rejection.”

I stayed silent while he told me to lie down and explained everything. He had this very curious look on his face, and was jotting notes down rapidly on a brown clipboard.

“Your body isn’t rejecting the new transplant,” he said to me evenly, “your body has accepted the eye as if it was your own. You have no need for immunosuppressive drugs. I suggest you stay here another day so we can monitor you, and then you’ll be back out, Sumeragi-san.”

I nodded, silent, smiling at the irony.

Your body has accepted the eye as if it was your own.

I smirked. It had always been meant to be like that, hadn’t it? Had I the strength, I would have laughed. But the pain was overwhelming and the only thing I managed was an uplifted, defiant middle finger at Destiny. 

The doctor smiled at me one more time, and told me to sleep. He injected some sort of drug into my arm, and that was the last thing I remembered.

The next day, they discharged me from the hospital with several painkillers, on the condition that I come back to them as soon as possible if my body showed any signs of rejecting the eye. It wouldn’t, I knew, but I didn’t tell them that. I smiled at the receptionist tightly, with a small, curt bow before walking outside and climbing into a taxi.

The doctor had asked me no questions. He had just smiled in that unnerving manner of his, and sent me on my way; on my way home.

* * *

I opened the door to the apartment, feeling the rush of stale Tokyo air that greeted me. The curtains flapped in the wind, the plants by the windowsill rustling, shaking loose dry, dead leaves. I walked to the window, and slid it shut, closing out the noise of the traffic down below, the bustle of people.

I spent my day in the bedroom, buried in the bedsheets, staring blankly at the closet. It no longer seemed flat to me, like some odd impressionist drawing; it was now very much alive. It had depth, a deep blackness like a dark abyss. It called to me in sinuous whispers, tendrils of smoke wrapping about my ears and tugging longingly. I ignored it.

I vaguely contemplated overdosing on my painkillers that night. The moon had already risen, a shaft of its bright light slicing through the drapes and landing in a small sliver on my bed. It too beckoned to me, but I turned my back to it.

I could have ended it so easily, just upended the entire bottle and swallowed the pills one by one, slipping slowly and surely in welcoming oblivion. But I didn’t. Because it had started beating that night.

It began quietly, so quietly in fact that I thought it was my own heart mocking me with its rhythm. I had tried to sleep then, and forget. But it grew louder, as if rounding a faraway street corner, and heading towards me at a slow stately pace, each boom of the drum proclaiming my doom in Death’s parade. I listened to it as it approached, too frightened too run and too tired to fall asleep.

_Doom doom doom,_ went the drums in the deep. It was an oddly regular beat, not like the syncopated rhythm of my heart, but it was unfailing, not even deviating a slight bit as I counted the time between beats.

If it wasn’t my heart…

My left hand reached up to cover the eye. It pulsed with life, a fiery heat that burnt my fingers with searing pain. I rolled out of bed with a shout, the blanket tangling about my legs as I stumbled into the bathroom. I flicked the light on and stared at myself in the mirror. It was strange to see two eyes in my head again; I had almost forgotten how I looked without the bandage, without the milky whiteness on one side of my face. I choked at the mismatched colors, one iris an emerald green, dull and tarnished; the other a rich bronze, thrumming with a life that was not my own.

“No!” I cried out, tearing at the alien eyeball, almost as if I wanted to rip it out of my head. But it kept beating, louder and more urgent. I stopped, my fingers poised on my eyelid. If I wanted to, I could have gouged it out right there. But I didn’t. Its beating was too precious too me. I fled the bathroom, leaving the light on and shutting the door with a resounding slam that shook the house but didn’t disturb the eye’s beating.

I breathed hard, my own heart aflutter in my chest, like some caged bird flapping against the bars, desiring liberation.

“No,” I hissed, putting a hand over it, as if to calm it down. I couldn’t let it out. Not yet. I couldn’t let it die. It had to live, so that my eye could continue its drumming. It was a steady pace of life. I had been reluctant to accept it at first, but now that it already dwelled within me, I had to take care of it. Because it was the only thing that was left of the man I loved.

The thought of him brought tears to my eye, and I covered my mouth in an attempt to force back the sob forming in throat. I willed it to go away, I willed the sound to be silent, but it didn’t work. I let out a strangled cry, and a dull splash of liquid dropped onto the kitchen counter. His eye, my eye was crying. It was crying in me. My own eye, the green one, stayed silent and did not shed a thing. I would have laughed at the irony of that, but the brown eye stopped me and continued its weeping until the tears were spent, and I collapsed.

I dreamt that night of the man of I loved, and he held me in his arms. I put my head to his chest, listening to steady beat there. It brought me solace, rest from the weariness of the world, and I smiled for the first time in many years. He smiled back at me, stroking my hair softly, his long fingers tangled in my raven locks. He told me he loved me, but I didn’t reply.

I woke up, and the warmness vanished, replaced by a cold drench of sweat that seemed to have been thrown upon me by some sort of haphazard bucket. It cried again, and my green eye joined it that time, washing away its once-bright childhood with grimy tears. 

“I loved you too,” I murmured, not knowing what else to say. I buried my face into the pillow, hoping that it would muffle my breathing and give me an eternity’s worth of peaceful rest.

But it didn’t, I woke up again later that day, on my back, staring at the ceiling towering over me. I listened to the steady beating again. It was a very clear drumming, unerring and confident, cruelly commanding. I obeyed it, because I had nothing else to do and no resistance left. It beat within me like a second heart, infusing me with some sort of hopeless automaton sort of life, as if it was a master puppeteer and I its unwitting marionette. It jerked my strings and I got up, went to the kitchen and made breakfast.

Then invisible hands moved again, and I walked outside, for all the world like some dead, wooden doll. “I loved you,” I whispered again, but my master didn’t listen, and kept me dancing to his own macabre tune.

I grew to hate it, but the more I hated it the more I loved it. No, I didn’t love. I wanted it—some twisted, ugly lust in me that need to be fulfilled. Once in a while, the hand would give me a rest, and drop me onto the couch where I could sit for endless hours, my head lolling at an unnatural angle, my eyes open yet unseeing. I wished for it all to end, but I also wished for more of the torture, more of the dead life it imbued me. And it gave me more, an unrelenting slave-driver, each lash of its whip a burn of pleasure across my skin, causing me to hiss and grovel for more. Always more.

Then one day, it deserted me. Heaven came crashing down, and the entire city of Tokyo shook at its very foundations. Buildings crumbled to the ground, giant chasms opening, tearing ravenously at solid earth. The sea came in a roaring tsunami, engulfing what pitiful little lives were left. I heard the screams. I was in the street, towers falling and smashing all about me, clouds of debris obscuring my sight, but not the screams. I heard them as clear as if they were speaking directly into my ear.

Then as abruptly as it had begun, it ended and the world turned still. The dust settled. The earth stopped shaking and groaning.

That day, everything died. I walked around, solitary silence all about me, looking at buried bodies, bloody arms stuck beneath crushing concrete weights. Nothing moved; even the wind was still as a stale air settled about the city and me. The city and me. I laughed. How ironic. Maybe, it was just me.

* * *

I sit now on a particularly strangely shaped piece of rubble, its pieces joined in a strange lower case ‘t,’ as if some bizarre crucifix. It is my only companion in this dead world, where the wind has ceased its voice and despair has engulfed even the most lively of living beings; namely me.

Funny, how the eye had stopped beating that morning that the world ended. I can’t hear it anymore, I can’t hear anything. I can’t see anything but an endless horizon of destruction, mountains of debris, underneath mountains of dead bodies. Strange, how I’m the only one left. 

I take a look at the cruciform behind me, standing tall amongst the piles of broken buildings, shattered glass, drenched in scarlet blood. It reminds me of those Christian tales I learned a little about during my childhood—how some wonderful, kind, generous man saved us all from our sins by dying on the cross. At least he had some kind of hope. I snort. I have none. Nothing left in this dead world. 

I cough, and the sound echoes throughout the rubble. Funny, I never would have thought that the afterlife would have looked like this. I let the bottle of pills drop from slip from my hand. It clatters to the ground, rolls a little bit before it stops, completely empty.

“Where are you?” I shout. I’ve been waiting too long. He must be here somewhere. I look around me, miles and miles of apocalyptic decay surround me. Where do I start looking?

“Well,” I say out loud to myself, my own voice sounding strange and distant as the sun sets and a comfortable darkness settles about me. I sit myself down, holding my chin in my hands. I think I’ll just sit here, and wait.”

Several eternities pass, the sun rises, the sun sets, the moonlight shines down upon my solitary figure for several nights, until I feel a familiar hand on my shoulder. It bears down on me, like some great weight, pushing me below invisible water. I sink down into its embrace, closing my eyes, sliding further and further into darkness.

“Hold me,” I murmur, my voice soft and breathy, detached, floating away like a weightless feather.

“I’ll hold you forever,” a deep voice answers. 

I wrap my arms around the strong body pressed against mine, I breathe deeply the scent of blood, death, and love; some exotic kind of tonic for which I have waiting much too long to taste.

“Never let go.”

“I won’t.”

**Author's Note:**

> I was running a 101 degree fever when I wrote this. It was a Sunday, right before my big Neuroscience final.


End file.
